How to make the best homemade chocolate cookies in the world?

The cookie, the ultimate US emblem

In the cookie game, Americans are kings. Knowing perfectly the concept of “chewy” – meaning soft to the core – American pastry chefs compete in creativity to offer THE recipe for unfailing cookies. Crunchy edges, large pieces of chocolate, mixture of sugars, it's all a question of dosage and especially cooking.

The right ingredients for perfect chocolate cookies

To make delicious cookies, you don't need unobtainable ingredients. Butter – lots of it – sugar, eggs, flour, and dark or milk chocolate (depending on taste) is enough to enjoy. After all, it’s a question of dosage and technique.

Long live mixed sugars

Concerning sugar, if you can only work with white sugar, it is better to opt for a mixture of refined and whole sugars. Brown sugar, vergeoise, muscovado, rapadura, all these ingredients will give more intensity and flavor to homemade cookies. Indeed, when white sugar only brings sweet taste to our sweets, whole sugars add a full-bodied and caramelized flavor to the whole. Don't worry, all these products are easily found in supermarkets or organic grocery stores.

Browned butter, the key to perfect chocolate cookies

Butter is also a key ingredient in cookies. It is thanks to the latter that the cookies – after cooling – will be extremely soft. So when it comes to butter, there is only one watchword: generosity. Let it be said, when we make cookies, we do not lighten the recipe, otherwise we will end up with a result that is too dry.

While melted butter remains a classic in this recipe, the best technique is to continue cooking the butter until you obtain brown butter. Thus, this product will give a slight “hazelnut” note to the whole. However, be careful, when you prepare browned butter, you lose volume. This means that 200g of melted butter only gives – approximately – 150/160g of browned butter. You will therefore need to supplement your browned butter with normal butter to achieve the right quantity of finished product. You can also melt a lot more butter than the quantity indicated in the recipe to have the right final quantity. Both techniques are valid, the most important thing is to have the right weight in our dough.

Chocolate again and again (okay, okay)

On the chocolate side, two teams compete. There are those who swear by chocolate chips, and those who prefer chopped chocolate. Here, we chose our camp, the second, for two reasons. Bar chocolate already costs less than chocolate chips of equal weight – a significant fact -, but also hand-chopped chocolate allows you to obtain good large chips when tasting, which is still – in all proportions kept – perfection in the case of cookies.

Indeed, you must not forget that there are only a few ingredients in the recipe for homemade chocolate cookies, so you have to choose them carefully and work with them.

In terms of quantity, the ideal is to have a good ratio between dough and pieces of chocolate (the famous Anglo-Saxon chunks) but if you have a heavy hand with the chocolate, we will never blame you. Never !

Wheat flour or oilseed powder?

For perfect cookies, what is best to include? Of flour ? Almond powder or oilseeds? A mix of the two? In fact, it all depends on the expected result.

Almond, hazelnut or pistachio powder will provide softness and additional flavor, while the flour will give the ideal texture.

If in any other pastry recipe, we warmly invite you to replace part of the flour with oilseed powder, regarding cookies, we only rely on flour which will allow you to obtain crunchy edges and a soft interior. We tested both versions, and after tasting, the texture of the homemade flour cookies is definitely the best.

Fleur de sel, the final touch

It's all a question of taste obviously, but adding fleur de sel to the dough and to the cookies before baking remains the best idea. To this day, we have never met a gourmand who is disappointed by the salty touch of our cookies. A word to the wise.

Techniques to adopt for perfect cookies

The ice cream spoon, the ideal utensil

Once our dough is ready and has rested in the fridge, we imitate the Americans and use an ice cream scoop to mold our dough balls. So all our cookies will be the same size, and allow us to maintain the same cooking in each batch.

Cooking, the crucial step

Last step and yet the most important, it is by perfectly measuring the cooking that we can obtain these half-cooked delights, a little crunchy, but always melting in the heart. Cooking also depends on the size of the dough balls, but generally speaking, it is between approximately 10 and 13 minutes at 180°C/th.6. Honestly, if you find a recipe with 20 minutes of cooking time, there's a good chance your cookies will be overcooked (that can be a choice too!)

When in doubt, always underbake your cookies. There is always time to put them back in the oven for 1 to 2 more minutes than to worry about overcooked cookies.

Now that you have all the cards in hand, all you need is this recipe.

The recipe for the best chocolate cookies in the world

Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 13 minutes
Rest: 2 hours

For 20 cookies

Ingredients

210 g of semi-salted butter + 30 to 50 g to complete
150 g brown sugar
30g muscovado
20 g of white sugar
1 egg + 1 yolk
210 g of flour
3/4 tsp. teaspoon of bicarbonate
1 C. teaspoon of fleur de sel
300 g chopped dark chocolate

Melt the butter until you get brown butter. Weigh it and top up with unmelted butter until it reaches 210g again. Let the butter cool completely (this is important so as not to melt the chocolate).
Mix the sugars and eggs. Add the browned butter, flour, bicarbonate and fleur de sel. Chop the chocolate into large pieces, add them to the dough.
Refrigerate and let the dough firm up for 2 hours.
Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 6.
Line a baking sheet with baking paper. Form balls of dough using an ice cream scoop and place these balls on the plate, spacing them apart. Sprinkle with fleur de sel.
Bake for 10 to 13 minutes depending on the size of the dough balls. Enjoy warm or cold.

For even more inspiration, here are 10 variations of chocolate cookies to die for.